Game g = new Game();

Google announced that the new Google Analytics (currently in beta and only rolled out to selected accounts) supports event goals.

So, if you have been using GA to track events within your Flash game, Social Network app or anything else, you can now interpret them directly as goals and don’t need to fake Pageview-calls of “virtual” (non-existing) pages in a hidden div or iframe (which is what I have been using before).

Interestingly, no mentioning of event funnels so far – which is strange, since funnels can be defined for “normal” goals anyway.

I started a LinkedIn group to talk about Business Intelligence and Data Mining for all kinds of games – social, browser, console, PC, mobile.

As I have posted before, I think this is a very interesting topic, but somehow there does not seem to be a lot of information available – so let’s talk about how you approach it, what kind of tools and frameworks do you use, how you integrate the various data sources, what kind of (automated or manual) decisions and optimizations you feed back into your game design and/or virtual economy parameters, and so on.

So, whether you already have vast experience in that area, or you just starting out, join now and let everybody know!

In our youth community AT.LANT.IS we want to encourage users to participate as much as possible.

From a game design perspective, users help to “rebuild” Atlantis by earning the ingame currency ORIs in the minigames. As soon as enough ORIs are available, a new feature in the world is unlocked for everyone – a new room, new avatar items, or a new game.

Besides that, more and more users are sending in their stories and drawings to be included in the library or the museum, respectively.

I hope we can gain more momentum with that user generated content – as always, some users seem to get into it more than others, some of them even use other platforms like YouTube:

startups.yeebase.com features my interview on their landing page today.

This is the perfect game for you: Achievement unlocked

As auntie pixelante puts it:

achievement unlocked is a game the goal of which is just the simple accumulation of these arbitrary goals. there are a hundred. you’ll have unlocked at least two before you even start the game, at which point you’ll unlock four more: one for having started the game, one for having reached the game’s first (and only) screen, one for not having moved yet, and one for having unlocked at least one achievement.

…

all the things that satisfy the compulsive behavior publishers assume we have.

Now, as I’m in the process of implementing a MMO-light’ish platform, the topic of having achievements has been raised a couple of times in various discussions between the designer and me already… and I’m kind of undecided whether they should and would play an important role in the platform, or not.

Thinking about it, I observe how strangely fulfilling it seems to be to  just count and compare the numbers of “friends” or “buddies” in Facebook, Xing or other similar platforms, at least for some people…

Is this the true meaning of virtual life – to be friends with as many people as possible (especially if it’s as easy as inviting somebody as friend with a click of the mouse, and no obligation to do anything else afterwards – EVER)?